Paine remained in France during the early Napoleonic era, but condemned Napoleon's dictatorship, calling him "the completest charlatan that ever existed".[5] In 1802, at President Jefferson's invitation, he returned to America where he died on June 8, 1809. Only six people attended his funeral as he had been ostracized for his criticisms and ridicule of Christianity.[6]

Contents

Early life

Paine was born February 9, 1737 [O.S. January 29, 1736,[1]] the son of Joseph Pain, or Paine, a Quaker, and Frances (née Cocke), an Anglican, in Thetford, an important market town and coach stage-post, in rural Norfolk, England.[7] Born Thomas Pain, despite claims that he changed his family name upon his emigration to America in 1774,[8] he was using Paine in 1769, whilst still in Lewes, Sussex.[9]

He attended Thetford Grammar School (1744-1749), at a time when there was no compulsory education.[10] At age thirteen, he was apprenticed to his stay-maker father; in late adolescence, he enlisted and briefly served as a privateer,[11] before returning to Britain in 1759. There, he became a master stay-maker, establishing a shop in Sandwich, Kent. On September 27, 1759, Thomas Paine married Mary Lambert. His business collapsed soon after. Mary became pregnant, and, after they moved to Margate, she went into early labour, in which she and their child died.

In July 1761, Paine returned to Thetford to work as a supernumerary officer. In December 1762, he became an excise officer in Grantham, Lincolnshire; in August 1764, he was transferred to Alford, at a salary of £50 per annum. On August 27, 1765, he was fired as an Excise Officer for "claiming to have inspected goods he did not inspect." On July 31, 1766, he requested his reinstatement from the Board of Excise, which they granted the next day, upon vacancy. While awaiting that, he worked as a stay maker in Diss, Norfolk, and later as a servant (per the records, for a Mr. Noble, of Goodman's Fields, and for a Mr. Gardiner, at Kensington). He also applied to become an ordained minister of the Church of England and, per some accounts, he preached in Moorfields.[12]

In 1767, he was appointed to a position in Grampound, Cornwall; subsequently, he asked to leave this post to await a vacancy, thus, he became a schoolteacher in London. On February 19, 1768, he was appointed to Lewes, East Sussex, living above the fifteenth-century Bull House, the tobacco shop of Samuel Ollive and Esther Ollive.

There, Paine first became involved in civic matters, when Samuel Ollive introduced him to the Society of Twelve, a local, élite intellectual group that met semestrally, to discuss town politics. He also was in the influential Vestry church group that collected taxes and tithes to distribute among the poor. On March 26, 1771, at age 34, he married Elizabeth Ollive, his landlord's daughter.

From 1772 to 1773, Paine joined excise officers asking Parliament for better pay and working conditions, publishing, in summer of 1772, The Case of the Officers of Excise, a twenty-one-page article, and his first political work, spending the London winter distributing the 4,000 copies printed to the Parliament and others. In spring of 1774, he was fired from the excise service for being absent from his post without permission; his tobacco shop failed, too. On April 14, to avoid debtor's prison, he sold his household possessions to pay debts. On June 4, he formally separated from wife Elizabeth and moved to London, where, in September, a friend introduced him to Benjamin Franklin, who suggested emigration to British colonial America, and gave him a letter of recommendation. In October, Thomas Paine emigrated from Great Britain to the American colonies, arriving in Philadelphia on November 30, 1774.

He barely survived the transatlantic voyage. The ship's water supplies were bad, and typhoid fever killed five passengers. On arriving at Philadelphia, he was too sick to debark. Benjamin Franklin's physician, there to welcome Paine to America, had him carried off ship; Paine took six weeks to recover his health. He became a citizen of Pennsylvania "by taking the oath of allegiance at a very early period."[13] In January, 1775, he became editor of the Pennsylvania Magazine, a position he conducted with considerable ability.

Paine designed the Sunderland Bridge over the Wear River at Wearmouth, England. It was patterned after the model he made for the Schuylkill River Bridge at Philadelphia in 1787, and the Sunderland arch became the prototype for many subsequent voussoir arches made in iron and steel.[14][15] He also received a British patent for a single-span iron bridge, developed a smokeless candle,[16][17] and worked with inventor John Fitch in developing steam engines.

American Revolution

Thomas Paine has a claim to the title The Father of the American Revolution because of Common Sense, the pro-independence monograph pamphlet he anonymously published on January 10, 1776; signed "Written by an Englishman", the pamphlet became an immediate success.[18], it quickly spread among the literate, and, in three months, 100,000 copies sold throughout the American British colonies (with only two million free inhabitants), making it a best-selling work in eighteenth-century America.[19] Paine's original title for the pamphlet was Plain Truth; Paine's friend, pro-independence advocate Benjamin Rush, suggested Common Sense instead.

Paine was not expressing original ideas in Common Sense, but rather employing rhetoric as a means to arouse resentment of the Crown. To achieve these ends, he pioneered a style of political writing suited to the democratic society he envisioned, with Common Sense serving as a primary example. Part of Paine's work was to render complex ideas intelligible to average readers of the day, with clear, concise writing unlike the formal, learned style favored by many of Paine's contemporaries.[20]

Common Sense was immensely popular, but how many people were converted to the cause of independence by the pamphlet is unknown.[21] Paine's arguments were rarely cited in public calls for independence, which suggests that Common Sense may have had a more limited impact on the public's thinking about independence than is sometimes believed.[22] The pamphlet probably had little direct influence on the Continental Congress's decision to issue a Declaration of Independence, since that body was more concerned with how declaring independence would affect the war effort.[23] Paine's great contribution was in initiating a public debate about independence, which had previously been rather muted.

Loyalists vigorously attacked Common Sense; one attack, titled Plain Truth (1776), by Marylander James Chalmers, said Paine was a political quack[24] and warned that without monarchy, the government would "degenerate into democracy".[21] Even some American revolutionaries objected to Common Sense; late in life John Adams called it a "crapulous mass." Adams disagreed with the type of radical democracy promoted by Paine, and published Thoughts on Government in 1776 to advocate a more conservative approach to republicanism.

In the early months of the war Paine published The Crisis pamphlet series, to inspire the colonists in their resistance to the British army. To inspire the enlisted men, General George Washington had The American Crisis read aloud to them.[25] The first Crisis pamphlet begins:

“

These are the times that try men's souls: The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as freedom should not be highly rated Thomas Paine, The Crisis

”

In 1777, Paine became secretary of the Congressional Committee on Foreign Affairs. The following year, he alluded to continuing secret negotiation with France in his pamphlets; the resultant scandal and Paine's conflict with Robert Morris eventually led to Paine's expulsion from the Committee in 1779. However, in 1781, he accompanied John Laurens on his mission to France. Eventually, after much pleading from Paine, New York State recognised his political services by presenting him with an estate, at New Rochelle, N.Y., and Paine received money from Pennsylvania and from the U.S. Congress at George Washington's suggestion. During the Revolutionary War, Paine served as an aide to the important general, Nathanael Greene. Paine's later years established him as "a missionary of world revolution."

Funding the American Revolution with Henry and John Laurens:

According to Daniel Wheeler's "Life and Writings of Thomas Paine," Volume 1 (of 10, Vincent & Parke, 1908) p. 26-27: Thomas Paine accompanied Col. John Laurens to France and is credited with initiating the mission. It landed in France in March 1781 and returned to America in August with 2.5 livres in silver, as part of a "present" of 6 million and a loan of 10 million. The meetings with the French king were most likely conducted in the company and under the influence of Benjamin Franklin. Upon return to the United States with this highly welcomed cargo, Thomas Paine and probably Col. Laurens, "positively objected" that General Washington should propose that Congress remunerate him for his services, for fear of setting "a bad precedent and an improper mode."

Thomas Paine statue erected on Prince Street in Bordentown City by the Bordentown Historical Society, New Jersey.

In addition, according to an appreciation by Elbert Hubbard in the same volume (p. 314) "In 1781 Paine was sent to France with Colonel Laurens to negotiate a loan. The errand was successful, and Paine then made influential acquaintances, which were later to be renewed. He organized the Bank of North America to raise money to feed and clothe the army, and performed sundry and various services for the colonies."

Henry Laurens (the father of Col. John Laurens) had been the ambassador to the Netherlands, but he was captured by the British on his return trip there. When he was later exchanged for the prisoner Lord Cornwallis (in late 1781), Paine proceeded to the Netherlands to continue the loan negotiations. There remains some question as to the relationship of Henry Laurens and Thomas Paine to Robert Morris as the Superintendent of Finance and his business associate Thomas Willing who became the first president of the Bank of North America (in Jan. 1782). They had accused Morris of profiteering in 1779 and Willing had voted against the Declaration of Independence. Although Morris did much to restore his reputation in 1780 and 1781, the credit for obtaining these critical loans to "organize" the Bank of North America for approval by Congress in December 1781 should go to Henry or John Laurens and Thomas Paine more than to Robert Morris.

Paine bought his only house in 1783 on the corner of Farnsworth Avenue and Church Streets in Bordentown City, New Jersey, and he lived in it periodically until his death in 1809. This is the only place in the world where Paine purchased real estate.

Rights of Man

In Fashion before Ease; —or,— A good Constitution sacrificed for a Fantastick Form (1793), James Gillray caricatured Paine tightening the stays of Britannia; protruding from his coat pocket is a measuring tape inscribed "Rights of Man".

Having taken work as a clerk after his expulsion by Congress, Paine eventually returned to London in 1787, living a largely private life. However, his passion was again sparked by revolution, this time in France, which he visited in December 1790. Edmund Burke, who had supported the American Revolution, changed his views within the decade, and wrote the critical Reflections on the Revolution in France, partially in response to a sermon by Richard Price, the radical minister of Newington Green Unitarian Church. Many pens rushed to defend the Revolution and the Dissenting clergyman, including Mary Wollstonecraft, who published A Vindication of the Rights of Men only weeks after the Reflections. Paine wrote Rights of Man, an abstract political tract critical of monarchies and European social institutions. He completed the text on January 29, 1791. On January 31, he gave the manuscript to publisher Joseph Johnson for publication on February 22. Meanwhile, government agents visited him, and, sensing dangerous political controversy, he reneged on his promise to sell the book on publication day; Paine quickly negotiated with publisher J.S. Jordan, then went to Paris, per William Blake's advice, leaving three good friends, William Godwin, Thomas Brand Hollis, and Thomas Holcroft, charged with concluding publication in Britain. The book appeared on March 13, three weeks later than scheduled, and sold well.

Undeterred by the government campaign to discredit him, Paine issued his Rights of Man, Part the Second, Combining Principle and Practice in February 1792. It detailed a representative government with enumerated social programs to remedy the numbing poverty of commoners through progressive tax measures. Radically reduced in price to ensure unprecedented circulation, it was sensational in its impact and gave birth to reform societies. An indictment for seditious libel followed while government agents followed Paine and instigated mobs, hate meetings, and burnings in effigy. The authorities aimed, with ultimate success, to chase Paine out of Great Britain and then try him in absentia.

In summer of 1792, he answered the sedition and libel charges thus: "If, to expose the fraud and imposition of monarchy . . . to promote universal peace, civilization, and commerce, and to break the chains of political superstition, and raise degraded man to his proper rank; if these things be libellous . . . let the name of libeller be engraved on my tomb".[26]

Paine was an enthusiastic supporter of the French Revolution, and was granted, along with Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and others, honorary French citizenship. Despite his inability to speak French, he was elected to the National Convention, representing the district of Pas-de-Calais. He voted for the French Republic; but argued against the execution of Louis XVI, saying that he should instead be exiled to the United States: firstly, because of the way royalist France had come to the aid of the American Revolution; and secondly because of a moral objection to capital punishment in general and to revenge killings in particular.

Regarded as an ally of the Girondins, he was seen with increasing disfavour by the Montagnards who were now in power, and in particular by Robespierre. A decree was passed at the end of 1793 excluding foreigners from their places in the Convention (Anacharsis Cloots was also deprived of his place). Paine was arrested and imprisoned in December 1793.

The Age of Reason

Before his arrest and imprisonment in France, knowing that he would probably be arrested and executed, Paine, following in the tradition of early eighteenth-century British deism, wrote the first part of The Age of Reason, an assault on organized "revealed" religion combining a compilation of inconsistencies he found in the Bible with his own advocacy of deism, calling for "free rational inquiry" into all subjects, especially religion. The Age of Reason critique on institutionalized religion resulted in only a brief upsurge in deistic thought in America, but would later result in Paine being derided by the public and abandoned by his friends.[3] In his "Autobiographical Interlude," which is found in The Age of Reason between the first and second parts, Paine writes, "Thus far I had written on the 28th of December, 1793. In the evening I went to the Hotel Philadelphia . . . About four in the morning I was awakened by a rapping at my chamber door; when I opened it, I saw a guard and the master of the hotel with them. The guard told me they came to put me under arrestation and to demand the key of my papers. I desired them to walk in, and I would dress myself and go with them immediately."

Being held in France, Paine protested and claimed that he was a citizen of America, which was an ally of Revolutionary France, rather than of Great Britain, which was by that time at war with France. However, Gouverneur Morris, the American ambassador to France, did not press his claim, and Paine later wrote that Morris had connived at his imprisonment. Paine thought that George Washington had abandoned him, and he was to quarrel with Washington for the rest of his life. Years later he wrote a scathing open letter to Washington, accusing him of private betrayal of their friendship and public hypocrisy as general and president, and concluding the letter by saying "the world will be puzzled to decide whether you are an apostate or an impostor; whether you have abandoned good principles or whether you ever had any."[27]

While in prison, Paine narrowly escaped execution. A guard walked through the prison placing a chalk mark on the doors of the prisoners who were due to be sent to the guillotine on the morrow. He placed a 4 on the door of Paine's cell, but Paine's door had been left open to let a breeze in, because Paine was seriously ill at the time. That night, his other three cell mates closed the door, thus hiding the mark inside the cell. The next day their cell was overlooked. "The Angel of Death" had passed over Paine. He kept his head and survived the few vital days needed to be spared by the fall of Robespierre on 9 Thermidor (July 27, 1794).[28]

Paine was released in November 1794 largely because of the work of the new American Minister to France, James Monroe[29], who successfully argued the case for Paine's American citizenship.[30] In July 1795, he was re-admitted into the Convention, as were other surviving Girondins. Paine was one of only three deputees to oppose the adoption of the new 1795 constitution, because it eliminated universal suffrage, which had been proclaimed by the Montagnard Constitution of 1793.[31] Paine believed that America, under John Adams, had betrayed revolutionary France and so in September 1798 he wrote an article for Le Bien Informé, advising the French government on how best to conquer America.[32]

In 1800, Paine purportedly had a meeting with Napoleon. Napoleon claimed he slept with a copy of Rights of Man under his pillow and went so far as to say to Paine that "a statue of gold should be erected to you in every city in the universe."[33] Paine discussed with Napoleon on how best to invade England and in December 1797 wrote two essays, one of which was pointedly named Observations on the Construction and Operation of Navies with a Plan for an Invasion of England and the Final Overthrow of the English Government,[34] in which he promoted the idea to finance 1000 gunboats to carry a French invading army across the English Channel. In 1804 Paine returned to the subject, writing To the People of England on the Invasion of England advocating the idea.[32]

On noting Napoleon's progress towards dictatorship, he condemned him as: "the completest charlatan that ever existed".[35] Thomas Paine remained in France until 1802, returning to the United States only at President Jefferson's invitation.

Later years

Paine returned to the U.S. in the early stages of the Second Great Awakening and a time of great political partisanship. The Age of Reason gave ample excuse for the religiously devout to dislike him, and the Federalists attacked him for his ideas of government stated in Common Sense, for his association with the French Revolution, and for his friendship with President Jefferson. Also still fresh in the minds of the public was his Letter to Washington, published six years before his return.

Paine died at the age of 72, at 59 Grove Street in Greenwich Village, New York City on the morning of June 8, 1809. Although the original building is no longer there, the present building has a plaque noting that Paine died at this location. At the time of his death, most American newspapers reprinted the obituary notice from the New York Citizen, which read in part: "He had lived long, did some good and much harm." Only six mourners came to his funeral, two of whom were black, most likely freedmen. The great orator and writer Robert G. Ingersoll wrote:

Thomas Paine had passed the legendary limit of life. One by one most of his old friends and acquaintances had deserted him. Maligned on every side, execrated, shunned and abhorred – his virtues denounced as vices – his services forgotten – his character blackened, he preserved the poise and balance of his soul. He was a victim of the people, but his convictions remained unshaken. He was still a soldier in the army of freedom, and still tried to enlighten and civilize those who were impatiently waiting for his death. Even those who loved their enemies hated him, their friend – the friend of the whole world – with all their hearts. On the 8th of June, 1809, death came – Death, almost his only friend. At his funeral no pomp, no pageantry, no civic procession, no military display. In a carriage, a woman and her son who had lived on the bounty of the dead – on horseback, a Quaker, the humanity of whose heart dominated the creed of his head – and, following on foot, two negroes filled with gratitude – constituted the funeral cortege of Thomas Paine.[36]

"In the summer of 1803 the political atmosphere was in a tempestuous condition, owing to the widespread accusation that Aaron Burr had intrigued with the Federalists against Jefferson to gain the presidency. There was a Society in New York called "Republican Greens," who, on Independence Day, had for a toast "Thomas Paine, the Man of the People", and who seem to have had a piece of music called the "Rights of Man". Paine was also apparently the hero of that day at White Plains, where a vast crowd assembled".

The original burial location of Thomas Paine in New Rochelle, New York.

A few years later, the agrarian radical William Cobbett dug up his bones and transported them back to the UK. The plan was to give Paine a heroic reburial on his native soil, but the bones were still among Cobbett's effects when he died over twenty years later. There is no confirmed story about what happened to them after that, although down the years various people have claimed to own parts of Paine's remains, such as his skull and right hand.[37][38]

Political views

Thomas Paine developed his natural justice beliefs in childhood, while listening to a mob jeering and attacking the town folk being punished in the Thetford stocks.[citation needed] He may also have been influenced by his Quaker father.[39] In The Age of Reason – the treatise supporting deism – he says:

The religion that approaches the nearest of all others to true deism, in the moral and benign part thereof, is that professed by the Quakers . . . though I revere their philanthropy, I cannot help smiling at [their] conceit; . . . if the taste of a Quaker [had] been consulted at the Creation, what a silent and drab-colored Creation it would have been! Not a flower would have blossomed its gaieties, nor a bird been permitted to sing.

Later, his encounters with the Indigenous peoples of the Americas made a deep impression. The ability of the Iroquois to live in harmony with nature while achieving a democratic decision making process, helped him refine his thinking on how to organize society.[40]

In the second part of The Age of Reason, about his sickness in prison, he says: ". . . I was seized with a fever, that, in its progress, had every symptom of becoming mortal, and from the effects of which I am not recovered. It was then that I remembered, with renewed satisfaction, and congratulated myself most sincerely, on having written the former part of 'The Age of Reason'". This quotation encapsulates its gist:

The opinions I have advanced . . . are the effect of the most clear and long-established conviction that the Bible and the Testament are impositions upon the world, that the fall of man, the account of Jesus Christ being the Son of God, and of his dying to appease the wrath of God, and of salvation, by that strange means, are all fabulous inventions, dishonorable to the wisdom and power of the Almighty; that the only true religion is Deism, by which I then meant, and mean now, the belief of one God, and an imitation of his moral character, or the practice of what are called moral virtues – and that it was upon this only (so far as religion is concerned) that I rested all my hopes of happiness hereafter. So say I now – and so help me God.

I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.

All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.

He also wrote An Essay on the Origin of Free-Masonry (1803-1805), about the Bible being allegorical myth describing astrology:

The Christian religion is a parody on the worship of the sun, in which they put a man called Christ in the place of the sun, and pay him the adoration originally payed to the sun.

How different is [Christianity] to the pure and simple profession of Deism! The true Deist has but one Deity, and his religion consists in contemplating the power, wisdom, and benignity of the Deity in his works, and in endeavoring to imitate him in everything moral, scientifical, and mechanical.

Paine was once often credited with writing "African Slavery in America", the first article proposing the emancipation of African slaves and the abolition of slavery. It was published on March 8, 1775 in the Postscript to the Pennsylvania Journal and Weekly Advertiser (aka The Pennsylvania Magazine and American Museum).[41] Citing a lack of evidence that Paine was the author of this anonymously published essay, some scholars (Eric Foner and Alfred Owen Aldridge) no longer consider this one of his works. By contrast, John Nichols speculates that his "fervent objections to slavery" led to his exclusion from power during the early years of the Republic.[42]

His last, great pamphlet, Agrarian Justice, he published in winter of 1795, further developing the ideas in the Rights of Man, about how land ownership separated the majority of people from their rightful, natural inheritance, and means of independent survival. Contemporarily, his proposal is deemed a form of basic Income Guarantee.[citation needed] The U.S. Social Security Administration recognizes Agrarian Justice as the first American proposal for an old-age pension; per Agrarian Justice:

In advocating the case of the persons thus dispossessed, it is a right, and not a charity . . . [Government must] create a national fund, out of which there shall be paid to every person, when arrived at the age of twenty-one years, the sum of fifteen pounds sterling, as a compensation in part, for the loss of his or her natural inheritance, by the introduction of the system of landed property. And also, the sum of ten pounds per annum, during life, to every person now living, of the age of fifty years, and to all others as they shall arrive at that age.

(Note that £10 and £15 would be worth about £800 and £1,200 in today's money.) [1]

Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Edison respectfully read his works.[43] Lincoln's law partner, William Herndon, reports that he (Lincoln) wrote a defence of Paine's deism in 1835, and friend Samuel Hill burned it to save Lincoln's political career;[44] and of him, Thomas Edison said:

I have always regarded Paine as one of the greatest of all Americans. Never have we had a sounder intelligence in this republic . . . It was my good fortune to encounter Thomas Paine's works in my boyhood . . . it was, indeed, a revelation to me to read that great thinker's views on political and theological subjects. Paine educated me, then, about many matters of which I had never before thought. I remember, very vividly, the flash of enlightenment that shone from Paine's writings, and I recall thinking, at that time, 'What a pity these works are not today the schoolbooks for all children!' My interest in Paine was not satisfied by my first reading of his works. I went back to them time and again, just as I have done since my boyhood days.[45]

At the war's end, the Congress gave Thomas Paine a farm in New Rochelle, N.Y., for services rendered. On it are located the Thomas Paine Cottage and the Thomas Paine Historical Society museum.[46] In the United Kingdom a statue of Thomas Paine (quill pen and inverted copy of Rights of Man in hand), stands in King Street, Thetford, Norfolk, his birth place. Moreover, in Thetford, the Sixth form is named after him.[47] Thomas Paine was ranked #34 in the 100 Greatest Britons 2002 extensive Nationwide poll conducted by the BBC[48]

At Bronx Community College, there is a bust of Thomas Paine in their Hall of Fame of Great Americans, and there are statues of Paine in Morristown and Bordentown, New Jersey, and in the Parc Montsouris, in Paris.[49][50] The town of Diss has a Thomas Paine Street. In Paris, there is a plaque in the street where he lived from 1797 to 1802, that says: "Thomas PAINE / 1737–1809 / Englishman by birth / American by adoption / French by decree". Yearly, between 4 and 14 July, the Lewes Town Council in the United Kingdom celebrates the life and work of Thomas Paine.[51]

^ Eric Foner, 1976. Tom Paine and Revolutionary America. p. 244. Foner wrote, "... it was not until the arrival of the new American ambassador, James Monroe, who claimed Paine as a citizen of the United States, that he was released -- the "citizen of the world" saved by the principle of national citizenship."

Paine, Thomas (Foner, Philip S., editor), 1944. The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, 2 volumes. Citadel Press. We badly need a complete edition of Paine's writings on the model of Eric Foner's edition for the Library of America, but until that goal is achieved, Philip Foner's two-volume edition is a serviceable substitute. Volume I contains the major works, and volume II contains shorter writings, both published essays and a selection of letters, but confusingly organized; in addition, Foner's attributions of writings to Paine have come in for some criticism in that Foner may have included writings that Paine edited but did not write and omitted some writings that later scholars have attributed to Paine.

Sourced

These people are either too superstitiously religious, or too
cowardly for arms; they either can not or dare not defend ;
their property is open to anyone who has the courage to attack
them... The supposed quietude of a good man allures the
ruffian; while on the other hand, arms, like law, discourage and
keep the invader and the plunderer in awe, and preserve order in
the world as well as property. The balance of power is the
scale of peace. The same balance would be preserved were all the
world destitute of arms, for all would be alike; but since some
will not, others dare not lay them aside. Horrid mischief
would ensue were one-half the world deprived of the use of
them; for while avarice and ambition have a place in the
heart of man, the weak will become a prey to the strong.

I speak an open and disinterested language, dictated by
no passion but that of humanity. To me, who have not only
refused offers, because I thought them improper, but have declined
rewards I might with reputation have accepted, it is no wonder that
meanness and imposition appear disgustful. Independence is
my happiness, and I view things as they are, without regard to
place or person; my country is the world, and my religion is to do
good..

The Rights of Man (1791)

Man is not the enemy of man but through the medium of a false
system of government.

The Rights of Man (1791)

The christian religion is a parody on the worship of the Sun,
in which they put a man whom they call Christ, in the place of the
Sun, and pay him the same adoration which was originally paid to
the Sun.

An Essay on the Origin of Free-Masonry (1803-1805);
found in manuscript form after Paine's death and thought to have
been written for an intended part III of The Age of
Reason. It was partially published in 1810 and published in
its entirety in 1818.

First published 10 January 1776, the most commonly
reproduced edition is the third, published on 14 February 1776. Full text online

Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages, are not
YET sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favour... Time
makes more converts than reason.

Time makes more converts than reason. (the Introduction)

Some writers have so confounded society with
government, as to leave little or no distinction between them;
whereas they are not only different, but have different origins.
Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness;
the former promotes our happiness POSITIVELY by uniting our
affections, the latter NEGATIVELY by restraining our vices. The one
encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first a
patron, the last a punisher. (Opening Line)

Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following
pages, are not YET sufficiently fashionable to procure them general
favour; a long habit of not thinking a thing WRONG, gives it a
superficial appearance of being RIGHT, and raises at first a
formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon
subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.

The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of
all mankind. Many circumstances hath, and will arise,
which are not local, but universal, and through which the
principles of all Lovers of Mankind are affected, and in the Event
of which, their Affections are interested. The laying a Country
desolate with Fire and Sword, declaring War against the natural
rights of all Mankind, and extirpating the Defenders thereof from
the Face of the Earth, is the Concern of every Man to whom Nature
hath given the Power of feeling; of which Class, regardless of
Party Censure, is the AUTHOR.

Who the Author of this Production is, is wholly
unnecessary to the Public, as the Object for Attention is the
DOCTRINE ITSELF, not the MAN. Yet it may not be unnecessary to say,
That he is unconnected with any Party, and under no sort of
Influence public or private, but the influence of reason and
principle.

Society in every state is a blessing, but government
even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state
an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to
the same miseries BY A GOVERNMENT, which we might expect in a
country WITHOUT GOVERNMENT, our calamity is heightened by
reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer.

WHEREFORE, security being the true design and end of
government, it unanswerably follows, that whatever FORM thereof
appears most likely to ensure it to us, with the least expense and
greatest benefit, is preferable to all others.

Of more worth is one honest man to society and in the sight of
God, than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived.

O! ye that love mankind! Ye that dare oppose not only tyranny
but the tyrant, stand forth! Every spot of the Old World is overrun
with oppression. Freedom hath been hunted round the globe. Asia and
Africa have long expelled her. Europe regards her like a stranger
and England hath given her warning to depart. O! receive the
fugitive and prepare in time an asylum for mankind.

When we are planning for posterity, we ought to remember that
virtue is not hereditary.

The sun never shined on a cause of greater worth. 'Tis
not the affair of a city, a country, a province, or a kingdom, but
of a continent—of at least one eighth part of the habitable
globe. 'Tis not the concern of a day, a year, or an age;
posterity are virtually involved in the contest, and will be more
or less affected, even to the end of time, by the proceedings now.
Now is the seed time of continental union, faith and honor. The
least fracture now will be like a name engraved with the point of a
pin on the tender rind of a young oak; The wound will enlarge with
the tree, and posterity read it in full grown characters.

It is of the utmost danger to society to make it (religion) a
party in political disputes.

Mingling religion with politics may be disavowed and reprobated
by every inhabitant of America.

I bid you farewell, sincerely wishing, that as men and
christians, ye may always fully and uninterruptedly enjoy every
civil and religious right.

I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather
strength from distress, and grow brave by relection.

There is something exceedingly ridiculous in the composition of
monarchy; it first
excludes a man from the means of information, yet empowers him to
act in cases where the highest judgment is required.

Hereditary succession has no claim. For all men being
originally equals, no one by birth could have the right to set up
his own family in perpetual preference to all others for ever, and
tho' himself might deserve some decent degree of honours of his
cotemporaries, yet his descendants might be far too unworthy to
inherit them.

I offer nothing more than simple facts, plain arguments, and
common sense . . .

A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a
superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a
formidable outcry in defense of custom.

Society is produced by our wants, and government by
wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively
by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our
vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates
distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher. Society
in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state
is but a necessary evil.

In the early ages of the world, according to the Scripture
chronology there were no kings; the consequence of which was, there
were no wars; it is the pride of kings which throws mankind into
confusion.

Every thing that is right or natural pleads for separation. The
blood of the slain, the weeping voice of nature cries, 'tis
time to part.

Government by kings was first introduced into the world by the
Heathens, from whom the children of Israel copied the custom. It
was the most prosperous invention the Devil ever set on foot for
the promotion of idolatry.

But where, say some, is the King of America? I'll tell you,
friend, he reigns above, and doth not make havoc of mankind like
the Royal Brute of Great Britain.... so far as we approve of
monarchy, that in America the law is king.

O ye that love mankind! Ye that dare oppose, not only the
tyranny, but the tyrant, stand forth! Every spot of the old
world is overrun with oppression. Freedom hath been hunted round
the globe. Asia, and Africa, have long expelled
her--Europe regards her like a stranger, and England hath given her
warning to depart. O! receive the fugitive, and prepare in time an
asylum for mankind.

... have every opportunity and every encouragement before us,
to form the noblest purest constitution on the face of the earth.
We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation,
similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah
until now. The birthday of a new world is at hand, and a race of
men, perhaps as numerous as all Europe contains, are to receive
their portion of freedom from the event of a few months."

"Wherefore, since nothing but blows will do, for God's sake let
us come to a final separation...

Small islands not capable of protecting themselves are the
proper objects for kingdoms to take under their care; but there is
something very absurd in supposing a continent to be perpetually
governed by an island.

THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer
soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from
the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves
the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not
easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the
harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain
too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives
every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon
its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an
article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated.

'Tis surprising to see how rapidly a panic will sometimes run
through a country. All nations and ages have been subject to them.
Britain has trembled like an ague at the report of a French fleet
of flat-bottomed boats; and in the fourteenth [sic (actually the
fifteenth)] century the whole English army, after ravaging the
kingdom of France, was driven back like men petrified with fear;
and this brave exploit was performed by a few broken forces
collected and headed by a woman, Joan of Arc. Would that heaven
might inspire some Jersey maid to spirit up her countrymen, and
save her fair fellow sufferers from ravage and ravishment! Yet
panics, in some cases, have their uses; they produce as much good
as hurt. Their duration is always short; the mind soon grows
through them, and acquires a firmer habit than before. But their
peculiar advantage is, that they are the touchstones of sincerity
and hypocrisy, and bring things and men to light, which might
otherwise have lain forever undiscovered. In fact, they have the
same effect on secret traitors, which an imaginary apparition would
have upon a private murderer. They sift out the hidden thoughts of
man, and hold them up in public to the world. Many a disguised Tory
has lately shown his head, that shall penitentially solemnize with
curses the day on which Howe arrived upon the Delaware.

The Crisis No. I

It matters not where you live, or what rank of life you
hold, the evil or the blessing will reach you all. The far
and the near, the home counties and the back, the rich and the
poor, will suffer or rejoice alike. The heart that feels not now is
dead; the blood of his children will curse his cowardice, who
shrinks back at a time when a little might have saved the whole,
and made them happy. I love the man that can smile in
trouble, that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by
reflection. 'Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he
whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct,
will pursue his principles unto death.
My own line of reasoning is to myself as straight and clear as a
ray of light. Not all the treasures of the world, so far as
I believe, could have induced me to support an offensive war, for I
think it murder; but if a thief breaks into my house, burns and
destroys my property, and kills or threatens to kill me, or those
that are in it, and to "bind me in all cases whatsoever" to his
absolute will, am I to suffer it? What signifies it to me,
whether he who does it is a king or a common man; my countryman or
not my countryman; whether it be done by an individual villain, or
an army of them? If we reason to the root of things we shall find
no difference; neither can any just cause be assigned why we should
punish in the one case and pardon in the other. Let them
call me rebel and welcome, I feel no concern from it; but I should
suffer the misery of devils, were I to make a whore of my soul by
swearing allegiance to one whose character is that of a sottish,
stupid, stubborn, worthless, brutish man.

The Crisis No. I

If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child
may have peace.

The Crisis No. I

Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like
men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it.

First Principles
of Government (1795)

He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy
from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a
precedent that will reach to himself.

Dissertation on First Principles of Government
(July 1795)

The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by
which other rights are protected. To take away this right
is to reduce a man to slavery, for slavery consists in being
subject to the will of another, and he that has not a vote in the
election of representatives is in this case.

It is never to be expected in a revolution that every
man is to change his opinion at the same moment. There never yet
was any truth or any principle so irresistibly obvious that all men
believed it at once. Time and reason must cooperate with
each other to the final establishment of any principle; and
therefore those who may happen to be first convinced have not a
right to persecute others, on whom conviction operates more slowly.
The moral principle of revolutions is to instruct, not to
destroy.

It is the nature and intention of a constitution to
prevent governing by party, by establishing a common principle that
shall limit and control the power and impulse of party, and that
says to all parties, thus far shalt thou go and no further. But in
the absence of a constitution, men look entirely to party; and
instead of principle governing party, party governs
principle.

An avidity to punish is always dangerous to liberty. It
leads men to stretch, to misinterpret, and to misapply even the
best of laws. He that would make his own liberty secure must guard
even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he
establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.

Letter to the
Addressers

And the final event to himself (Mr. Burke) has been, that, as
he rose like a rocket, he fell like the stick.

Part I
(1793)

I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for
happiness beyond this life.

Each of those churches show certain books, which they call
revelation, or the word of God. The Jews say, that their word of
God was given by God to Moses,
face to face; the Christians say, that their word of God came by
divine inspiration: and the Turks say, that their word of God (the
Koran) was brought by an angel from Heaven. Each of those churches
accuse the other of unbelief; and for my own part, I disbelieve
them all.

All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish,
Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions
set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and
profit.

Whenever we read the obscene stories the voluptuous
debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting
vindictiveness with which more than half the bible is filled, it
would be more consistent that we call it the word of a demon rather
than the word of god. It is a history of wickedness that has served
to corrupt and brutalize mankind; and, for my part, I sincerely
detest it as I detest everything that is cruel.

It is necessary to the happiness of man, that he be
mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in
believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe
what he does not believe.

It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I
may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When
a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his
mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not
believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other
crime.

It is a contradiction in terms and ideas to call
anything a revelation that comes to us at second hand,
either verbally or in writing. Revelation is necessarily limited to
the first communication. After this, it is only an account of
something which that person says was a revelation made to him; and
though he may find himself obliged to believe it, it cannot be
incumbent on me to believe it in the same manner, for it was not a
revelation made to me, and I have only his word for it that it was
made to him.

But if objects for gratitude and admiration are our desire, do
they not present themselves every hour to our eyes? Do we not see a
fair creation prepared to receive us the instant we are born — a
world furnished to our hands, that cost us nothing? Is it we that
light up the sun, that pour down the rain, and fill the earth with
abundance? Whether we sleep or wake, the vast machinery of the
universe still goes on. Are these things, and the blessings they
indicate in future, nothing to us? Can our gross feelings be
excited by no other subjects than tragedy and suicide? Or
is the gloomy pride of man become so intolerable, that nothing can
flatter it but a sacrifice of the Creator?

If JesusChrist
was the being which those Mythologists tell us he was, and that he
came into this world to suffer, which is a word they sometimes use
instead of to die, the only real suffering he could have endured,
would have been to live. His existence here was a state of
exilement or transportation from Heaven, and the way back to his
original country was to die. In fine, everything in this strange
system is the reverse of what it pretends to be.

The doctrine of redemption is founded on a mere pecuniary idea
corresponding to that of a debt which another person might pay; and
as this pecuniary idea corresponds again with the system of second
redemption, obtained through the means of money given to the Church
for pardons, the probability is that the same persons fabricated
both the one and the other of those theories; and that, in truth
there is no such thing as redemption — that it is fabulous, and
that man stands in the same relative condition with his
Maker as he ever did stand since man existed, and that it is his
greatest consolation to think so.

For what is the amount of all his prayers but an attempt to
make the Almighty change his mind, and act otherwise than he does?
It is as if he were to say: Thou knowest not so well as I.

The word of god is the creation we behold and it is in this
word, which no human invention can counterfeit or alter, that God
speaketh universally to man.

I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church,
by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by
the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own
mind is my own church.

It is only by the exercise of reason that man can
discover God.

What more does man want to know than that the hand or power
that made these things is divine, is omnipotent? Let him believe
this with the force it is impossible to repel, if he permits his
reason to act, and his rule of moral life will follow of
course.

As to the Christian system of faith, it appears to me
as a species of Atheism — a sort of religious denial of God. It
professes to believe in a man rather than in God. It is a compound
made up chiefly of Manism with but little Deism, and is as near to
Atheism as twilight is to darkness. It introduces between
man and his Maker an opaque body, which it calls a Redeemer, as the
moon introduces her opaque self between the earth and the sun, and
it produces by this means a religious, or an irreligious, eclipse
of light. It has put the whole orbit of reason into shade.

That which is now called natural philosophy,
embracing the whole circle of science, of which astronomy occupies
the chief place, is the study of the works of God, and of the power
and wisdom of God in his works, and is the true
theology.

The Book of Job and the 19th Psalm, which even the Church
admits to be more ancient than the chronological order in which
they stand in the book called the Bible, are theological orations
conformable to the original system of theology. The internal
evidence of those orations proves to a demonstration that the study
and contemplation of the works of creation, and of the power and
wisdom of God, revealed and manifested in those works, made a great
part in the religious devotion of the times in which they were
written; and it was this devotional study and contemplation that
led to the discovery of the principles upon which what are now
called sciences are established; and it is to the discovery of
these principles that almost all the arts that contribute to the
convenience of human life owe their existence. Every
principal art has some science for its parent, though the person
who mechanically performs the work does not always, and but very
seldom, perceive the connection.

It is a fraud of the Christian system to call the
sciences human invention; it is only the application of them that
is human. Every science has for its basis a system of
principles as fixed and unalterable as those by which the universe
is regulated and governed. Man cannot make principles, he
can only discover them.

The Almighty Lecturer, by displaying the principles of
science in the structure of the universe, has invited man to study
and to imitation. It is as if He had said to the
inhabitants of this globe that we call ours, "I have made an earth
for man to dwell upon, and I have rendered the starry heavens
visible, to teach him science and the arts. He can now provide for
his own comfort, and learn from my munificence to all to be kind to
each other."

The age of ignorance commenced with the Christian system.

Part II
(1795)

People in general do not know what wickedness there is in this
pretended word of God. Brought up in habits of superstition, they
take it for granted that the Bible is true, and that it is good;
they permit themselves not to doubt of it, and they carry the ideas
they form of the benevolence of the Almighty to the book which they
have been taught to believe was written by his authority. Good
heavens! it is quite another thing; it is a book of lies,
wickedness, and blasphemy; for what can be greater blasphemy than
to ascribe the wickedness of man to the orders of the Almighty?

Chapter I: The Old Testament

The sublime and the ridiculous are often so nearly related,
that it is difficult to class them separately. One step above the
sublime makes the ridiculous, and one step above the ridiculous
makes the sublime again. 1

Chapter I: The Old Testament, note

This is probably the original of Napoleon's celebrated mot, Du
sublime au ridicule il n'y a qu'un pas (From the sublime to
the ridiculous there is but one step).

Of all the systems of religion that ever were invented, there
is none more derogatory to the Almighty, more unedifying to man,
more repugnant to reason, and more contradictory in itself, than
this thing called Christianity. Too absurd for belief, too
impossible to convince, and too inconsistent for practice, it
renders the heart torpid, or produces only atheists and fanatics.

Chapter III: Conclusion

The study of theology as it stands in Christian
churches, is the study of nothing; it is founded on nothing; it
rests on no principles; it proceeds by no authorities; it has no
data; it can demonstrate nothing; and admits of no
conclusion. Not any thing can be studied as a science
without our being in possession of the principles upon which it is
founded; and as this is not the case with Christian theology, it is
therefore the study of nothing.

Chapter III: Conclusion

Agrarian Justice
(1795 - 1796)

Men did not make the earth... It is the value of the
improvements only, and not the earth itself, that is individual
property... Every proprietor owes to the community a ground rent
for the land which he holds.

A Discourse delivered by Thomas Paine, at the Society of the
Theophilanthropists at Paris, 1798

The universe is composed of matter, and, as a system, is sustained by motion. Motion is not a
property of matter, and without this motion the solar system could
not exist. Were motion a property of matter, that undiscovered and
undiscoverable thing, called perpetual motion, would establish
itself. It is because motion is not a property of matter, that
perpetual motion is an impossibility in the hand of every being,
but that of the Creator of motion. When the pretenders to Atheism
can produce perpetual motion, and not till then, they may expect to
be credited.

Without the pen of Paine, the sword of Washington
would have been wielded in vain.

Attributed to John
Adams since at least its appearance in the Annual Report of
the Attorney General (1957) by New York Department of Law; in
Religion and Political Thought‎ (2006) by Michael Hoelzl
and Graham Ward it quoted as a statement of 1805; conflicting
attribution is made in Thomas Paine and the Promise of
America‎ (2006) by Harvey J. Kaye, p. 5, where it is
attributed to Joel
Barlow. The earliest incident of it yet found in internet
searches is The Tragic Patriot: A Drama of Historical
Significance in Five Acts and Twenty-Five Scenes (1954) by
Joseph Lewis.

I know not whether any man in the world has had more
influence on its inhabitants or affairs for the last thirty years
than Tom Paine.

John Adams, in a
letter to Benjamin Waterhouse (29 October
1805). Though these are often cited as if they were words which
continued in his early admiration and respect for Paine, they
actually came at a time of bitter dispute with many of his
religious and political ideas. A more extensive quotation of the
statement reads: "I am willing you should call this the Age of
Frivolity as you do, and would not object if you had named it the
Age of Folly, Vice, Frenzy, Brutality, Daemons, Buonaparte, Tom Paine, or the Age of the
Burning Brand from the Bottomless Pit, or anything but the Age of
Reason. I know not whether any man in the world has had
more influence on its inhabitants or affairs for the last thirty
years than Tom Paine. There can be no severer satyr on the age. For
such a mongrel between pig and puppy, begotten by a wild boar on a
bitch wolf, never before in any age of the world was suffered by
the poltroonery of mankind, to run through such a career of
mischief. Call it then the Age of Paine."

I consider Paine our greatest political
thinker. As we have not advanced, and perhaps never shall
advance, beyond the Declaration and Constitution, so Paine has had
no successors who extended his principles.

Abraham
Lincoln, as quoted in A Literary History of the American
People‎ (1931) by Charles Angoff, p. 270

When Bonaparte returned from Italy he
called on Mr. Paine and invited him to dinner: in the course of his
rapturous address to him he declared that a statue of gold ought to
be erected to him in every city in the universe, assuring him that
he always slept with his book "Rights of Man" under his pillow and
conjured him to honor him with his correspondence and advice.
This anecdote is only related as a fact. Of the sincerity
of the compliment, those may judge who know Bonaparte's principles
best.

I have been lately introduced to the famous Thomas
Paine, and like him very well. He is vain beyond all belief, but he
has reason to be vain, and for my part I forgive him. He
has done wonders for the cause of liberty, both in America and
Europe, and I believe him to be conscientiously an honest man. He
converses extremely well; and I find him wittier in discourse than
in his writings, where his humour is clumsy enough.

From LoveToKnow 1911

THOMAS PAINE (1737-1809), English author, was
born at Thetford, Norfolk, on the 29th of January
1737, the son of a Quaker staymaker. After several years at sea and
after trying various occupations on land, Paine took up his
father's trade in London,
where he supplemented his meagre grammar school education by
attending science lectures. He succeeded in 1762 in gaining an
appointment in the excise, but
was discharged for neglect of duty in 1765. Three years later,
however, he received another appointment, at Lewes in Sussex. He took a vigorous
share in the debates of a local Whig club, and in 1772, he wrote a pamphlet
embodying the grievances of excisemen and supporting their demands
for an increase of pay. In 1774 he was dismissed from the service
for absence without leave - in order to escape his creditors.

A meeting with Benjamin Franklin in London was the
turning point in his life. Franklin] provided him with letters to
his son-in-law, Richard Bache, and many of the leaders in the
colonies' resistance to the mother country, then at an acute stage.
Paine sailed for America in
1774. Bache introduced him to Robert Aitkin, whose Pennsylvania
Magazine he helped found and edited for eighteen months. On
the 9th of January 1776 Paine published a pamphlet entitled
Common Sense, a telling array of arguments for separation and for the
establishment of a republic. His argument was that independence was
the only consistent line to pursue, that "it must come to that some
time or other"; that it would only be more difficult the more it
was delayed, and that independence was the surest road to union.
Written in simple convincing language, it was read everywhere, and
the open movement to independence dates from its publication. Washington
said that it "worked a powerful change in the minds of many men."
Leaders in the New York
Provincial Congress considered the advisability of answering it,
but came to the conclusion that it was unanswerable. When war was
declared, and fortune at first went against the colonists, Paine,
who was then serving with General Greene as volunteer aide-de-camp, wrote
the first of a series of influential tracts called The
Crisis, of which the opening words, "These are the times that
try men's souls," became a battle-cry. Paine's services were
recognized by an appointment to be secretary of the commission sent
by Congress to treat with the Indians, and a few months later to be
secretary of the Congressional committee of foreign affairs. In
1779, however, he committed an indiscretion that brought him into
trouble. He published information gained from his official
position, and was compelled to resign. He was afterwards clerk of
the Pennsylvania legislature, and accompanied John Laurens during
his mission to France. His
services were eventually recognized by the state of New York by a grant of an
estate at New
Rochelle, and from Pennsylvania and, at Washington's
suggestion, from Congress he received considerable gifts of
money.

In 1787 he sailed for Europe with the model of an iron bridge he had designed. This
was publicly exhibited in Paris
and London, and attracted great crowds. In England he determined to "open the eyes of the
people to the madness and stupidity of the government." His first
efforts in the Prospects on the Rubicon (1787) were directed against
Pitt's war policy, and towards securing friendly relations with
France. When Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in
France appeared, in 1790, Paine at once wrote his answer,
The Rights
of Man first part appeared on the r3th of March 1791, and
had an enormous circulation before the government took alarm and
endeavoured to suppress it, thereby exciting intense curiosity to
see it, even at the risk of heavy penalties. Those who know the
book only by hearsay as the work of a furious incendiary will be
surprised at the dignity, force and temperance of the style; it was the circumstances that made it
inflammatory. Pitt "used to say," according to Lady Hester Stanhope, "that
Tom Paine was quite in the right, but then he would add, `What am I
to do? As things are, if I were to encourage Tom Paine's opinions
we should have a bloody revolution.'" Paine was indicted for treason in May 1792, but before
the trial came off he was elected by the department of Calais to the French convention,
and escaped into France, followed by a sentence of outlawry. The first years
that he spent in France form a curious episode in his life. He was enthusiastically
received, but as he knew little of the language translations of his
speeches had to be read for him. He was bold enough to speak and
vote for the "detention of Louis during the war and his perpetual
banishment afterwards," and he pointed out that the execution of
the king would alienate American sympathy. He incurred the
suspicion of Robespierre,
was thrown into prison, and
escaped the guillotine
by an accident. Before his
arrest he had completed the
first part of the Age of Reason, the publication of which
made an instant change in his position on both sides of the Atlantic, the indignation in
the United
States being as strong as in England. The Age of
Reason can now be estimated calmly. It was written from the
point of view of a Quaker who did not believe in revealed religion,
but who held that "all religions are in their nature mild and
benign" when not associated with political systems. Intermixed with
the coarse unceremonious ridicule of what he considered
superstition and bad faith are many passages of earnest and even lofty eloquence in favour of a
pure morality founded on natural religion. The work in short - a
second part, written during his ten months' imprisonment, was
published after his release - represents the deism of the 18th century in the hands of a
rough, ready, passionate controversialist.

At the downfall of Robespierre, Paine was restored to his seat
in the convention, and served until it adjourned in October 1795.
In 1796 he published a long letter to Washington, attacking his
military reputation and his presidential policy with inexcusable
bitterness. In 1802 Paine sailed for America, but while his
services in behalf of the colonies were gratefully remembered, his
Age of Reason and his attack on Washington had alienated
many of his friends. He died in New York on the 8th of June 1809,
and was buried at New Rochelle, but his body was in 1819 removed to
England by William Cobbett.

Thomas Paine (January 29, 1737 – June 8, 1809) was an English pamphleteer, revolutionary, radical, inventor, and intellectual. He lived and worked in Britain until he was 37, when he emigrated to the British American colonies during American Revolution. His main contribution was the powerful, widely-read pamphlet Common Sense (1776), advocating colonial America's independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain, and of The American Crisis (1776–1783), a pro-revolutionary pamphlet series. Thomas Paine after the American Revolution wrote the Age of Reason. This pamphlet advocated for the usage of reason when it came to religious claims and was critical of organized religion. Paine along with other American founders such as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison were supporters of reason when it comes to religion in lieu of revelation. Paine was part of the greater Age of Enlightenment movement that dated back to about the early 17th century.